An Epic in Verse - guest post from Mary Soon Lee

An Epic in Verse

Mary Soon Lee

Once upon a time, fantastical epics were written in poetry: the Epic of Gilgamesh (about four thousand years old), the Iliad (about three thousand years old), the Mahabharata (about two thousand years old), Beowulf (a mere thousand years old). Nowadays, however, we expect our epic fantasy in prose, often as a series of hefty volumes. But in 2013, I started writing a group of poems that grew into my own epic fantasy, The Sign of the Dragon, which tells the story of King Xau, chosen by a dragon to be king.

Why did I do this? It was almost an accident. I meant the opening poem to be a standalone piece. Except I was drawn to the boy in that poem. So I wrote another poem about him, and another, and another, until, three years later, I had over three hundred poems that together made up Xau's story.

I said that it was almost an accident, but writing the tale in individual poems suited me well. My youngest child was eight years old when I began. I wanted a writing project that would fit neatly into school days. Happily, I could usually complete a poem before it was time to pick up my children. Often I could get the laundry done as well. So writing my epic in verse was a major advantage for me. As for how it affected the tale itself…

Firstly, I should be clear that The Sign of the Dragon is not like the epics I mentioned earlier. It is mostly written in free verse, without rhyme or meter. And I think there's very little chance people will be studying it thousands of years from now!

Breaking the long story into poem-sized pieces gave me flexibility. I could switch from one character's perspective to another. I could zoom in on a particular battle, or a moment in that battle, or show that same moment from multiple perspectives. I could zoom out to an overview, or skip past months between one poem and the next. I could switch styles. (Yes, there are even some rhymed poems and haiku nestled in the book.)

Here, for instance, is a short poem about how news of an enemy invasion arrives, before the next poem switches to King Xau's thoughts as he rides off to war. This is the only time in the book that either Pigeon Six or the pigeon girl are mentioned.

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Pigeon Six

(first published in Uppagus)

Pigeon Six: no rank,
no name beyond her number,
but she the soldier sent
with news of the invasion.

Pigeon Six: no honors,
her message all that mattered
to any but the pigeon-girl
who cleaned her empty perch.

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A conventional novel can also present dozens of different perspectives or switch styles, but I think it takes more skill on the writer's part, as well as more concentration on the reader's part. The break between poems in itself signals a change, such as a shift in mood or a jump in time.

Breaking the story into poems also made it easier to write the tale out of sequence, and so allowed me to gradually work out the story's shape. For example, soon after I began, I wrote several poems about a demon, then later I went back and inserted a whole war before the demon ever appears.

One poetic device that I deliberately used was the epithet, following in the footsteps of Homer's wine-dark sea and swift-footed Achilles. So King Xau is sometimes called Horse Boy, and his first enemy is "red-haired, red-handed in war." I'm fond of repetition, plus it lets readers track characters without having to memorize every name. Some of the epithets are straightforward—"captain of Xau's guards" or "the young king"—yet can still be helpful. In hindsight, I wish I'd used epithets more extensively.

I loved being able to switch point of view! Unsurprisingly, we see Xau's perspective. And we also see from the perspective of his enemies, his bodyguards, his sister, his wife, his chief advisor, soldiers, a stable boy, a minstrel, a cleaning woman, a dragon, a monster, a cat. That was a great delight to me.

I think the switches in point of view had one other effect. They let me write about a character who was, or so my family warned me, too perfect. Xau spends most of the story doing what he believes is the right thing, no matter the personal cost to himself. This is exactly, precisely how I wanted Xau to be. Yet staying inside Xau's head all the time would make the story rather one-note. Shifting to his enemies, or seeing him from the point-of-view of one of his companions, hopefully adds flavor. I say "hopefully" because sometimes there's a gap between intentions and the end result. Of all the things I've written, The Sign of the Dragon is the one that means the most to me. But that doesn't guarantee readers will love it.

An ebook edition of The Sign of the Dragon appeared early in the pandemic, but it was only in 2025 that the first print edition was published. It's a chunky book, nearly six hundred pages, and contains forty wonderful illustrations by Gary McCluskey, two of which are shown here.

I will close with two short extracts showing very different points of view. First, one of Xau's enemies, and then the royal cat.

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(From Vengeance, first published in Star*Line)

They think her nothing, think her beaten,
think the dungeon holds her in.

But hers the will which woke the dead,
hers the wrath, the wolves' wild tread.

They think that's her: defeated, lamed,
thrown to the floor, tethered, tamed;

think her trapped, her limbs bound tight,
think the blindfold stops her sight.

---

Permissible that the king pauses,
pushes away paper and brush,
bends down to stroke
behind her ears.

Later, she will inspect his desk.
Items may need to be rearranged.

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Mary Soon Lee’s The Sign of the Dragon has a book page with blurb, reviews and more samples, and can be ordered from Amazon or other good bookstores.

Mary Soon Lee is also the author of three poems, “Alien Armada”, “Not for Sale, Used Asteroid, One Owner” and “What Heroines Read” in past issues of The Future Fire.

My Augmentation: A Look at Star Trek: Discovery’s Airiam

Guest post by Jordan Hirsch

[CW: mental health issues]

Picture it: a Family-Feud-style board. Steve Harvey at the mic. A studio audience silent and waiting. The question: what comes to mind when thinking about Star Trek?

Survey says: space, utopia, starships, Vulcans.

Mental health? [X]

Disability representation? [X]

Bodily autonomy [X]

While these are good answers and cases could be made for each of them when looking at specific episodes, none of the above have historically been major themes in the long-running franchise.

But let’s rewind from the 23rd century back to 2018.

The past six years have been some of the hardest of my life. I won’t go into too much detail, but between religious trauma, broken relationships, and losing what I thought was my dream job on top of the ongoing pandemic, the necessary civil uprising here in Minnesota after George Floyd was murdered, and the general despair of our political climate, my mental health plummeted. This manifested in depression and anxiety disorder, which my nervous system translated to vertigo-like symptoms, digestion issues, some agoraphobia, and probably other things I’ll realize down the road weren’t normal for me.

I don’t share this laundry list of experiences for pity, but for context and solidarity with anyone who might be dealing with something similar.

It took more than two years to discover the above symptoms were due to my anxiety disorder, after finally seeking medication during a ten-day, unrelenting panic attack. I was prescribed an SSRI, and let me tell you, I wish I’d started it so much sooner. At the time, though, I experienced what I now know so many others have when starting medication for their mental well-being.

Was I a failure? Weak? Would I be taking these pills for the rest of my life?

Would I even be myself while on these meds?

Should I survey 100 people to see what they said, top 6 answers on the board? Thankfully, answers for me lay elsewhere.

Star Trek: Discovery, which just wrapped its fifth and final season a few months ago, reignited the franchise when it came on our screens in 2017. In many ways, it truly went where no Star Trek had gone before. From the first on-screen canon gay couple to re-designed Klingons to darker and grittier storylines, Discovery paved its own frontier.

Other Trek series have dipped their toes into themes of mental health before, in episodes such as “It’s Only a Paper Moon” of Deep Space Nine, “Extreme Risk” of Voyager, and season 3 of Enterprise. However, these arcs were contained, leaving little to no lasting effects that would come up for characters later in the series. Discovery, however, tackled these issues with multiple characters over multiple seasons, and one in particular has made a lasting impression on me as I’ve navigated my own health.

Airiam is a quiet and steady member on Discovery’s bridge. Unfortunately, for most of the first season and half, we don’t get to know much about her. She’s dutiful, she’s smart, she’s dependable. She has friends on the ship, and she’s even third in command. She also has a tragic backstory.

When returning from eloping, Airiam was in a tragic shuttle accident that damaged most of her body and killed her husband. To stay alive, she had to be cybernetically augmented, with most of her body needing to be artificial. Now, Airiam’s brain can’t store memories properly, and when her artificial storage reaches capacity, she has to choose which memories to delete and which ones to keep.

None of this stopped her, however. She still pursued her Starfleet career, she still spars and trains with shipmates, she still rocks at board game night.

Airiam lives on her own terms, and (spoilers) heroically, she dies on her own terms as well, sacrificing herself after becoming infected by a malicious AI.

We see a lot of on-screen deaths in Discovery, but we rarely see any post-death ceremonies. However, we do get to see Airiam’s funeral, and during that time, her crewmates share what she meant to them, speaking of her impact, her resilience, her loyalty, and her outlook on life.

However, it was what Airiam’s friend and Discovery’s pilot Keyla Detmer said that puts my own sentiments into words: “[Airiam] showed me that my augmentation didn’t make me an imitation of myself. It made both of us new, that there could be a future.” You see, Keyla had been injured in the Klingon War, losing an eye and having her own augmentation.

Her words cut right to my core as I questioned if starting medication would alter my identity.

The analogy isn’t perfect; they never are. But what is perfect is the way this character gave me permission to need my own augmentation, the way she assured me I’d still be me, even while on medication.

My SSRIs aren’t permanent like Airiam’s augmentations. I can change my dose, stop taking them, choose something else with my doctor’s advice and supervision. But even if they do need to be a tool in my toolbox for the rest of my life, that doesn’t mean that I’m less myself. That doesn’t mean I’ve failed or I’ve forsaken all or part of who I am. On the contrary, I’m more myself than I’ve been in a very long time.

Would I have made it here without Airiam?

The optimist in me likes to think so. But I owe the Star Trek: Discovery writers and creators and the two actresses that played Airiam (Sara Mitich and Hannah Cheesman) so much for making this journey easier for me. For helping me embrace what proper medication could do for my brain, my body, my life. For showing me that an augmented me is still entirely me. For giving me permission to, once again, live life on my own terms.

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Jordan Hirsch’s poetry chapbook, Both Worlds, is available from Bottlecap Press (https://bottlecap.press/products/both).

Jordan Hirsch writes speculative fiction and poetry while occupying the ancestral and current homelands of the Dakota people, Mni Sota Makoce. She is a recent graduate of Concordia University’s MFA in Creative Writing program and is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association. You can find more of Jordan’s work on her website (jordanrhirsch.wordpress.com).

Worlds; and writing; and worlds without writing

Guest post by Juliet Kemp

For me, at least in English, ‘language’ and ‘written language’ are very nearly the same thing—when I think of words I see them written down (perhaps partly due to the fact that I read absurdly young). But even among literate people that experience is far from universal; and even in our highly literacy-dependent culture not everyone is literate; and then there are plenty of cultures (past and present) whose traditions are primarily or entirely oral, with the written word an afterthought or non-existent.

None of which I was thinking about when I first began to write my novella Song, Stone, Scale, Bone. I started off with a mental image of a knight guiding a noble through a catacomb, in search of a magic bone… and then I thought: why? Not why they were going there (that was the magic bone, although admittedly at that point I wasn’t quite sure what that was for either), but why was Sir Cade a guide as well as a guard, and why was she using a song to orient herself?

Perhaps, I thought, there’s no map. Perhaps, even, there can’t be a map. Perhaps directions, in this world, are kept in purely oral form, as songs and rhymes, and Cade’s order of knights holds the responsibility of keeping those directions.

Perhaps, I thought, they don’t have writing at all.

It’s harder than you might think—as someone from a very literacy-heavy culture—to remember all the things that aren’t there if you don’t have writing. Signposts, for example. What about coins? Drawings but no words? Numbers? Ideograms don’t quite count as writing, so coins could have something on those lines. (I fudged this slightly by not describing the money Cade uses.)

Given Cade’s job, I spent a while thinking about maps—which are basically drawings—but the use and accuracy of maps even in Western culture has varied substantially over the centuries. You’d struggle to use the Imago Mundi (below) to travel by, for example; although the Tabula Peutingeriana did a decent job of being a stylised route map (less good once you’re off-road).

Some questions which didn’t come up in the story but which I’ve thought about since: the first known uses of writing were bureaucratic (recording agricultural products and contracts); with other functions of government like taxation swiftly following. Cade’s nearby city houses an Emperor; how is the Empire managed without writing? Do tally-sticks count as writing? As above, what about ideograms, or mnemonics, which aren’t quite writing (but might develop into writing in the future)? Perhaps the Empire employs rememberers to keep track of these bureaucratic issues and what people owe, just as Lady Arel has to recite the treaty she is trying to use to prevent war. Presumably storytellers are important in this culture, just as they were in (for example) Ancient Greece and in pre-10th centure Britain (the Iliad and Odyssey, and Beowulf, are all thought to have been later writings-down of stories told as part of an oral tradition).

The final thing that occupied me for a while when I was writing was that there’s no way, in a book with a close-third-person POV, of saying that this is a part of the worldbuilding. Because, obviously, my narrator, Sir Cade, doesn’t know that she doesn’t have the concept of the written word, because, well, she doesn’t have the concept of the written word. So here I am, telling people about it outside the book; but if you read it, I’m interested to hear about how it came across to you. (And I hope you enjoy the story!)

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Song, Stone, Scale, Bone

Sir Cade expected an easy afternoon’s guiding job. She didn’t expect it to end up sneaking her client over a border to avert a war, whilst being trailed by a bored dragon. And becoming haunted by the ghost of her best friend and sword-brother, that was definitely a surprise.

But if it’s all her responsibility, well, that means it’s all down to her to fix it. Whatever the cost.
Right?

“Song, Stone, Scale, Bone is a deceptively rich and fulfilling work that blends together explorations of grief, friendship, obligation, and mutual support. With its combination of classic fantasy motifs, some lightly crafted magic, and a nuanced sense of where the personal and familial can meet the machinations of leadership and politics, I found Song an intriguing, well-constructed, and satisfying read.”—Andi C. Buchanan, author of Sanctuary

Buy links: Amazon UK (ebook/print), Amazon US (ebook/print), or order from your local bookshop.

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Juliet Kemp (they/them) is a queer, non-binary, writer. They live in London by the river, with their partners, kid, and dog. The first book of their fantasy series, The Deep And Shining Dark was on the Locus 2018 Recommended Reads list; the fourth and final book, The City Revealed came out in 2023. Their short fiction has appeared in venues including Uncanny, Analog, Cast of Wonders, as well of course as the three stories (“I Thought of You”, “Dragon Years”, “Just as You Are”) here in The Future Fire, and they were short-listed for the WSFA Small Press Award 2020. When not writing or child-wrangling, Juliet knits, indulges their fountain pen habit, and tries to fit an ever-increasing number of plants into a microscopic back garden. They can be found at julietkemp.com, @julietk.bsky.social and @juliet@zirk.us.

A Tribute to Joel Lane 1963-2013

Guest post by Rachel Verkade

If you dig through the refuse and litter of the old internet, you may come upon the ruins of old message boards. Scattered and context-less, these pages and words drift through the invisible ether of cyberspace, offering little snippets of life in the internet’s heydays.

Among these lost pages is the former message board of prolific, long-lived, and celebrated British author Ramsey Campbell. While perhaps not the most populated corner of the internet, Campbell’s message board became a haven for spec fic readers and writers, young and old, to congregate, share work and plans, discuss stories and novels, and generally make connections regarding the craft. Included in there are some names that dark fiction afficianados will recognise, talking amongst each other and their fans, sharing stories and news, planning meetups. It was a little haven for those who loved and created and consumed weird literature, a dark sanctuary where like-minded people found each other.

Sift through those old pages, and come upon an entry from mid-November 2013. At 7:24 PM, a user posted that Birmingham author Joel Lane had died in his sleep. What followed below was a raw outpouring of grief and shock.

What?! You are sure it is no joke?

This is awful, awful news.

This is a joke, right?

This can’t be true. […] It just can’t be true.

Ah fuck, no.

This is like the most weird experience I’ve ever had. Crying over a man I’ve never met…

Life isn’t fucking fair.

No. […] for me, for now: no.

Long Dead Venusians by Phil Wilson

Long Dead Venusians: Meditation on Climate Change as a Cosmic Theme

Guest post by Phil Wilson

The night sky has always been both a magnet for curiosity and a projection screen for fantasy. The ancients saw mythical beings in the Rorschach of celestial patterns. Galileo, Copernicus and the church fought battles over the nature of truth in these same heavens. Now, fittingly, in our era of collapsing economies, hypertrophied corporations and climate catastrophe, the cosmos embodies our political anxiety.

Hemispheric View of Venus Centered at South Pole © 1996 NASA

A whimsical piece in The Nation (“Are Aliens Who Visit Earth Likely to Be Socialist?”) features a debate over whether or not alien visitors are likely to be socialists. In “A Statistical Estimation of the Occurrence of Extraterrestrial Intelligence in the Milky Way Galaxy,” Cai et al. reflect on the likelihood that some, most, or all of our techno-savvy brethren, presumably scattered across the galaxy, have fatally befouled their home planets, or violently obliterated themselves before they were able to master interstellar communication or travel. The authors of this study conclude that “P_ann” (the probability of self annihilation) is the most significant factor in deriving probability formulae for future interactions with extraterrestrials.

The human impulse to project has tossed Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher into the sky. These political ghouls are now entangled in the streaks of the Milky Way, deregulating the environmental protections of an entire galaxy and freeing ET to frack and strip mine to his heart's content. Are we all alone in a universe in which self destruction is an existential mandate, or are we earnestly expecting a species of interstellar socialists to descend from the heavens bringing a message of salvation?

Octopus © 2020 Diego Delso (BY-CC-SA)

Our own earth-bound stories are the default for extraterrestrial absence: aliens (as we imagine them) may be a bit more clever than ourselves (figuring out light speed travel and wormholes) and we routinely depict them with huge heads and atrophied limbs, resembling our future selves. We could, if we wished, imagine a species of interstellar octopuses. The octopus has, arguably, more magnificent neural structures than our own, enabling the blessed mollusc to instantaneously survey the complexity of the ocean floor and consciously—using themselves in lieu of a canvas—reproduce the colors, contours and shadows of their surroundings. How self-effacing! How brilliant to intuitively divine the techniques of photorealism in three dimensions! Octopuses, in their hundreds of millions of years of success, have proven that gifted creatures are not inevitably destined to channel intellect toward an endgame of self obliteration. No group of octopuses (so far as we know) has ever founded a corporation. Can human beings even imagine superior intelligence untainted by capitalism?

Mitski sang in her famous song, “Nobody”:

Venus, planet of love
Was destroyed by global warming
Did its people want too much too?

Years ago, in elementary school, I read a book about the planets that showed a fanciful picture of the surface of Venus—a lush world full of Dr. Seuss-like creatures and exotic plants. This was long before Soviet space probes determined that, beneath Venusian clouds, the planetary surface does not at all resemble a tropical lagoon, but rather imitates a pizza oven. The temperatures on Venus run as high as 900 degrees Fahrenheit thanks to a greenhouse effect on steroids. The atmosphere is 97% CO2, clouds of sulfuric acid obscure our view of the basalt paved surface and the atmospheric pressure would transform a range rover into a crushed hunk of melting metal.

And yet NASA climate modeling suggests that cool oceans may once have been a Venusian feature. Is Venus the ultimate victim of biblical rebuke? We earthlings know all about sin and the brutal forces of retribution. Has Venus, the wayward and ruined sister of our lovely blue marble, suffered the full ferocity of fire and brimstone? Jonathan Edwards, the 17th century New England preacher who made hellfire into a personal fetish, might as well have been describing Venus to his quivering congregants. In our florid, contemporary imaginations, we do not envision Venusian sin as a matter of skimping on interplanetary Jesus so much as we picture a Venusian society that capitulated to the menace of capitalism. But Jonathan Edwards was partly right. Sin and fire have a mutual plan.

Mitski's theory of Venusian demise has respectable, scientific support—at least speculatively. Jason T. Wright, professor of astrophysics at the University of Pennsylvania, writes in “Prior Indigenous Technological Species”:

In this paper, I discuss the possibility for such prior indigenous technological species; by this I mean species that are indigenous to the Solar System, produce technosignatures and/or were spacefaring, and are currently extinct or otherwise absent. The question of why this species is not extant in the Solar System is not relevant to much of my discussion, but needs to be addressed at least well enough to establish plausibility for the hypothesis. The most obvious answer is a cataclysm, whether a natural event, such as an extinction-level asteroid impact, or self-inflicted, such as a global climate catastrophe.

The less salacious, more generally embraced speculation regarding Venus's sad history points the finger at Volcanism and increased solar output as the sources for greenhouse agents (NASA Study). We earthlings have our own volcanic history as a reference point. Many geologists agree that the remnants of the Siberian Traps Volcanic flows (categorized as a "large igneous province") are the smoking gun for the Permian/Triassic boundary extinction, colloquially referred to as "the great dying." Until now, the Permian extinction holds the title for climate ruin on earth, turning oceans into toxic, stagnant, murderous graveyards for Trilobites, Tabulate and Rugose corals. Even six species of insects—the great masters of industrial breeding—were wiped from evolutionary history by the rage of Permian climate warming.

Study of the deep, geological past offers generous imaginative license to scientists, and Gavin Schmidt—director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies—has stated that carbon spikes in the geological record should be scoured for biomarkers of fossil fuels. Is it possible that some large brained offshoot of Permian protomammals attained the capacity for Exxon/Mobile psychopathy? Are the Siberian Traps falsely accused of the crimes really enacted by the profiteers of a lost Permian empire?

Gavin Schmidt (“Could an Industrial Prehuman Civilization Have Existed on Earth before Ours?”) believes that intelligent life might have evolved at multiple times in geological history, only to succumb to the awful temptations of industrialization. Perhaps capitalism, consumerism and environmental destruction has run as a repeating loop—a horror show with sequels (canceled and renewed). Geologists have favored mass extinction as a reference point, a means of geological punctuation, but, until recently, extinction seemed like nothing more than a product of natural caprice. Now, we have an alternative explanation, a new story to mull over and consider. As we reflect on the sixth extinction, might our method of self destruction be more than a mere one off event? Are any of earth's past mass extinctions also rooted in the deadliest of all mortal sins—corporate greed?

No matter how hot Phoenix or El Paso get, no matter how many square miles of polar ice caps melt, no matter how many wildfires turn Canadian forests into New York City ash, climate change is, apart from the excruciatingly complex science, a story, an unfinished allegory written, perhaps, in an obscure dialect. There are many versions of climate change—the story—along a continuum between the imminent onset of human extinction espoused by Guy McPherson and The Heritage Foundation, oil industry funded pablum of drooling denial. The fate of humanity is absolutely founded on the climate story. In essence, our existence is contingent on a poetry slam, a narrative contest fumbling for the hearts and minds of the human race. Human survival, if it is to prevail, will require a ferocious explosion of narrative..

As storytelling creatures, humans have performed narrative contortions to make ourselves the beneficiaries of mass extinction. The Permian extinction gave us the treasured dinosaurs, and the KT extinction cleansed the earth for our own ascension as the apex of the mammalian empire. But The Long Dead Venusians story (whether or not it happened in the manner that Mitski sings about, or happened at all) rather stymies our self-congratulatory instincts. The Venusians fucked up big-time billions of years ago and turned their lush paradise into an irredeemable hellscape. They left not a thread of silver lining. In so far as we identify with the long dead Venusians, their relevance to us is exclusively cautionary.

UK environmental writer and activist George Monbiot often talks about the importance of storytelling as it pertains to politics and the existential threats of capitalism. Monbiot specifically extols the “restoration story”—a narrative form that describes both the nefarious forces throwing the world into disorder, and the solution that mobilizes disobedience to "restore" lost harmony.

All political stories have a vision (or nightmare scenario) of potential ruin should people fail to rise up and resist evil systems. Jonathan Edwards was a master storyteller focused obsessively on the matter of potential ruin. His virtuosity shames the tepid rhetoric of climate change. The very fire and brimstone that perhaps charred the bones of our long dead Venusians, became, for him, the narrative tool to move an entire society to tremble in the pews. Did Venus crash and burn for want of a Jonathan Edwards?

O sinner! Consider the fearful danger you are in: it is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hand of that God, whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you, as against many of the damned in hell. You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it, and burn it asunder.

Jonathan Edwards engaged each listener personally—images of hellfire had an immediate, visceral impact. This is not the case for climate change storytelling, with rhetoric hopelessly focused on far away, slow moving events, like dysregulated ocean currents and glacial melt in Antarctica. Even the term “climate change,” utterly fails as a narrative device. As Kirkpatrick Sales notes, the phrase accurately describing the severity of our collective assailant is “global overheating.” We cannot address the issue of murderous capitalism and overconsumption without the full power of storytelling. Edwards railed at handwringing congregants who imagined themselves perched upon rotting floorboards, while below, the flames of eternity hungrily craved a bounty of sinners. Edwards was the master storyteller that is absent today.

We know that climate change is not inevitably an abstraction, because, according to Sarah Young, writing in The Independent, 19% of children in the UK have had climate change nightmares. A nightmare is unlikely to be about crop failure in Honduras, even if climate change is largely about the suffering of poor people long oppressed by colonial contingencies. The climate nightmare is about fire and flames honing in on the sweating dreamer.

Bad dreams inhabit the same personal range of fears as a Jonathan Edwards sermon. Thus, I very recently had a dream of running to the porch thermometer with my clothes trailing plumes of smoke, to see that the temperature had risen past 300 degrees Fahrenheit. The real thermometer on my porch tops out at 120, but dreams encompass a larger set of realities than a $10 hardware store device can reveal. The temperatures on earth have not reached 300 degrees since the Hadean Eon. Not even the end Permian apocalypse approached such scale. But my dreams, apparently outran the descriptive horrors of my native planet in search of Venusian geological history. Venus, and only Venus, tells us the true story of CO2 and its intentions.

The story of the long dead Venusians has what our own climate change story does not—an incontrovertible conclusion. Would human fate be altered if interplanetary visitors were in fact socialists who had surveyed the smoldering remnants of every capitalist planet in the Milky Way (and brought us the photos)? What if time traveling, alien socialists wielded the uncut documentary of Long Dead Venusians? Would we see rightwing Venusian think tanks funded by the Venusian oil industry? We suspect that Venusians rather obediently accepted dubious explanations from politicians and industry profiteers. If we imagine that Venus’s most gifted storytellers failed to inspire the passions of those who might have acted with collective resolve, would that move our own storytellers to aspire to attain the poetic force of, say, Jonathan Edwards? Edwards spoke about the agony of hellfire with absolute certainty, and yet we, with far more data, equivocate while being helplessly swept along by a Venusian reprise.

As bright and lovely as Venus has been in recent mornings, the orb reminds me that Venusians capitulated to absurd denialism. They failed to launch general strikes or to use force against psychopathic oil barons, banks, industrialist farmers and government officials. Their downfall was one of collective banality, a shared and shriveled imagination that could not conceive of a Venus devoid of profit motives, so called free markets, and the virulent addictions of consumerism and materialism.

Venus global view, © 1996 NASA

 What did the final moments of Venusian life look like? Was the planet bathed in the dull glow of smoke and fire resembling our own conflagrations in Canada and Siberia? What about floods, searing heat, draughts and the violent rage of the Venusians themselves as they acted out their climate induced frustrations upon one another?

A.M. Gittlitz took the "yes" position in The Nation's debate on whether or not alien visitors would inevitably be socialists. His answer obliquely addresses our losing battle with climate change:

J. Posadas, the leader of the Posadists, offered a political and economic defense of our future alien visitors in his 1968 “Flying Saucers” essay. For alien civilizations to travel hundreds of light years to Earth, he wrote, they would need to have an “infinitely superior” form of social organization, “without struggle and antagonisms.” Marxists call the type of society that has advanced beyond our current divisions of nation, class, race, and gender—a society in which each gives according to their ability and takes according to their needs—socialist.

I am almost certain that Gittlitz read the study referencing P_ann. He must know that the capitalist impulse to chase profits over the cliff of self destruction is an existential challenge to every alien civilization. But, are we really talking about interstellar socialists or are aliens merely a rhetorical prop—like my Long Dead Venusians? We are unfortunate victims of The Fermi Paradox, and no aliens are going to instruct us about the virtues of socialism. The goalposts have moved; aliens are never anything more than thinly disguised earthlings, and interstellar travel is simply a fantasy like free markets, trickle down and Jonathan Edwards’ pyromaniacal God. We do not need to look up, like Fermi, and ask, “where are the aliens?” Instead, we should look straight ahead, at one another, and ask—“where are the socialists?”

How to Break a Curse

How To Break A Curse

Guest post by Tenacity Plys

If you’ve ever tweeted about feeling like a changeling, you’re probably neurodivergent. That was one of the signs for me: that ugly duckling feeling of being so fundamentally different from the other kids in your grade you could be a separate species. Basically, if the popular kids treated you like you weren’t human in middle school, you might have been considered inhuman in the Middle Ages as well—you would have been a changeling.

While changelings were babies disowned by their parents as too strange to be human, that narrative is complicated by the fact that neurodivergence is genetic. While some members of a family might be noticeably different enough to be diagnosed, some people fly under the radar their whole lives. Thinking back on family stories I’ve heard over the years, I realized I’d never know how many people in my family were like me. They didn’t even know it themselves!

With that in mind, when I sat down to write about neurodivergence and the changeling myth, I didn’t just want to write about one changeling. I wanted to write about generations of them. The book that resulted is called Family Curse, but neurodivergence isn’t the curse—curses work better as a metaphor for generational trauma. The neurodivergence of the characters isn’t a metaphor for anything, actually; I just think it’s cool.

Like every story, Family Curse is about what people in the present will do with what they inherit from the past. The autobiographical level of my work is usually an exegesis of some aspect of my personal past that can illuminate my way forward (even if it takes me years to see what my subconscious was trying to tell me when I wrote it, lol). In a larger sense, the past can mean our inheritance from the last generation, our society’s institutions, or something else, depending on who’s telling the story and who’s listening. Curses trouble the passage from past to future.

In curse narratives, the past makes war on the present, dragging characters back in time to repeat cycles of violence. The Oresteia visualizes a curse as a flock of Furies stalking the palace at Mycenae; these bird-women represent lust for revenge, which is the fatal flaw of Atreus, then Agamemnon, then Clytemnestra, then Orestes and Electra. It’s like the House of Atreus has a vendetta against itself, and tellingly, no revenge killing can resolve it. Orestes finally breaks it by… *checks notes* …inventing Athenian democracy? As an ending it sounds weird, but this abrupt left turn is a lesson: turning to justice rather than revenge is what quiets the Furies and their endless clamoring for more blood. In other words, that’s how a curse can be broken.

Since the Atreus curse always appears in the form of one family member killing another because they believe it will give them justice for past wrongs, I would argue that’s literally all their curse is—no bird-women needed. A classics professor in The Secret History speculates that what the ancients called fate is actually another word for what we call psychology; characters in Greek drama have free will despite the fact that their “fatal” flaws make their actions look deterministic. In this way, one act of violence centuries ago can echo down the generations, even when memory of the actual event is lost.

When we don’t even remember the origin of a family curse, how do we make sense of ourselves, let alone find a path to healing? If a missing piece of my familial puzzle came to me at 28, how many more are left to find? I wrote my book as a replacement for the fragments of history I can never get back—not just for my biological family, but the people like me through the centuries whose stories will never be told. If I’m lucky, this (and therapy) will get the Furies to leave me alone.

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You can pick up Tenacity Plys’s novella Family Curse - Field Notebooks 1880–2020 as a print chapbook or e-book from Bottlecap Press at https://bottlecap.press/collections/on-sale-now/products/curse.

Trending: Tiny Tales

Trending: Tiny Tales

Guest post by Fiona Jones

Micro-literature is a big trend right now. Something to do with the glimpsiness of screen-scrolling and the needle-sharp joy of haiku, mixed in a shot glass and taken at a gulp.

I’m not dissing full-length novels. They’ll always be in, forever, because a good novel is like a holiday abroad: immersive, luxurious, refreshing. But, by destiny or gnatlike attention span, I’m a micro writer. Most of what I’ve written is under 500 words. I’ve got micro-fiction and micro-CNF scattered halfway round the Internet, plus now and then on paper. And I’m touting these anthologies because some of my work’s inside:

• Trickster’s Treats #4
• Nano Nightmares, edited by Shirley Dee and others
• Teach.Write Fall/Winter 2020
• Prepositionally Challenged volume 1

Where to send your own finely-cut gemstones? I started with Friday Flash Fiction (they publish shedloads of drabbles a week, plus occasional longer flashes). From there I went on to The Drabble, Dribble Drabble, 50-Word Stories, 101 Words, Montana Mouthful, Tiger Moth Review and actually anywhere that doesn’t stipulate a minimum wordcount. The number of publishers asking for micros seems to grow every year. Most venues don’t pay for micro-stories, but Longleaf Review did, Mothers Always Write and All Guts No Glory did too, and Folded Word used to.

It’s hard to choose a favourite among my own micro-pieces—either the stories or the essays. I think the one that’s travelled the farthest is my speculative fiction about the inventor of the wheel, who watches his invention progressing down through the centuries. This story appeared first on 50-Word Fiction, then a second website, and finally someone requested to republish it in Arabic.

Or maybe it’s not finally. Maybe it’s still got places to go, people to meet. The best thing about stories is that sometimes they just keep going.

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Fiona M. Jones’s poem “Oak Tree” can be found in TFF #55.

A Quiet Afternoon anthology (and food pairings!)

Guest post: Laura DeHaan from our friends at Grace & Victory.

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Hello! This is Laura DeHaan, slush goblin for Grace&Victory’s A Quiet Afternoon anthology of Low-Fi speculative fiction.

Low-Fi stories are comfort reads, slices of life with low stakes and reasonable expectations for what the characters in the story can accomplish, preferably (though not always) with a speculative slant. I’ve spoken elsewhere about wanting a feeling of instant nostalgia when I’m reading Low-Fi, so here I thought I’d delve a little deeper into why each of these stories caught my attention as being specifically (and wonderfully!) Low-Fi. As a bonus, I’ll be offering up my ideal comfort food pairings to enjoy with these stories.

“The Baker’s Cat” by Elizabeth Hart Bergstrom: Fittingly, our first story is all about comfort food! How could I resist the loving descriptions of the bread and desserts? And who wouldn’t want a helpful trio of charming talking animals to teach them how to knead dough? There is a wealth of kindness and gentleness in this story, and it was perfect for A Quiet Afternoon.

Food pairing: Vanilla creamhorns and a steamy chai latte.

“An Inconvenient Quest” by Rebecca Gomez Farrell: From taste to smell, we get another sensory overload in “An Inconvenient Quest.” While on paper it appears to be the standard high-fantasy tale of a dangerous quest to save a fairy queen, there’s so much whimsy in the telling—and such an improbable cure!—that it stays a very comfortable read.

Food pairing: Deep fried delights! Shrimp tempura, arancini, mashed potato croquettes!

“Rising Tides” by Mary Alexandra Agner: I’m a sucker for stories about magical robots, but I always thought their magic would be treated like another programming language, or maybe involve fireballs instead of laser beams. I certainly wasn’t expecting a robot to perform stage magic! The unexpected pairing of sentient tech with such benign magic (especially in a moody seaside setting) made it an instant win.

Food pairing: Sourdough with melty peanut butter and cold ginger beer.

“After Bots” by Rachael Maltbie: The second of our magical robots stories, though here it’s more like hauntings and sculptures. I was happy to see a story with an older protagonist, especially a LADY (gasp!) being a MECHANIC (double gasp!) but also (is it allowed??) having FEELINGS (the most gasps!). Plus it’s a blue-collar setting with ghosts! There’s so much here that should be more mainstream.

Food pairing: Grilled cheese with pickles on the side, along with a chocolate milkshake thick enough to stand a spoon in.

“It’s All in the Sauce” by Elizabeth Hirst: I love the idea of solving one problem with a different problem. It’s a very relatable real-life scenario. And as “The Baker’s Cat” has proven, food descriptions are always welcome in Low-Fi.

Food pairing: Once a year my brother will have a backyard barbecue, and his ribs paired with a rye and Coke (heavy on the rye, light on the Coke… or whiskey instead, whatever’s on the shelf) leave me as satiated as reading “It’s All In The Sauce.”

“Sarah, Spare Some Change” by Ziggy Schutz: I was immediately drawn to the dreamlike narrative. What’s happened to the world where students slip their bodies during school? How do you gamble on clouds? I don’t know, and I do not care. I love being thrown into a world and not having the rules explained. I love not having fifty pages of backstory and ten of glossary. Let me enjoy what’s right here.

Food pairing: A creamy seafood chowder, where you can’t identify all the bits until you put them in your mouth.

“Ink Stains” by Tamoha Sengupta: Remember when every protagonist of spec fic was a male writer? I think it was so he could have a lot of free time to just fart around and not worry about whether his adventures could fit into a 9-5 job. So how pleased was I to see this trope subverted and follow instead the writer’s son—and then have the ink itself become the hero of the story?

VERY. I was VERY pleased.

Food pairing: Being from Toronto, I already knew about Indian rotis—butter chicken, saag paneer, all great. Then I went to Ottawa and learned about Sri Lankan kottu roti from a VERY enthusiastic patron at a one-man hole-in-the-wall take-out place. “You’ve had roti before? Oh no, not like THESE!” she said. I have never met anyone so delighted to share her favourite restaurant’s menu before. Anyway, kottu roti. Great stuff.

“Salt Tears and Sweet Honey” by Aimee Ogden: So often when mythological sea creatures forsake the waves to live on land, we see only the start of it: stolen selkie skins, or a desire for legs. In this story of a life well lived, we see what might keep a mermaid from wanting to return to her former home. Like the ocean, there’s a lot beneath the surface in this story, and it raises a lot of questions about the culture the protagonist left behind.

Food pairing: Chocolate mead and lemon-custard scones.

“12 Attempts at Telling about the Flower Shop man (New York New York)” by Stephanie Barbé Hammer: Sometimes you want to create a new genre and you set yourself rules (not even a lot of rules!) and then a story comes along and you say, “Well, whatever, I’m buying it.” It’s remarkably satisfying. We’d been a bit hesitant to buy this one because we wanted this anthology to be all about that speculative fiction and “12 Attempts” simply wasn’t. It was, however, charming AF, and what’s the point of making a new genre-breaking genre if you can’t do exactly as you please?

Food pairing: Fresh Rice Krispies squares, still gooey and hot from the pot.

“The Dragon Peddler” by Maria Cook: Just because we wanted to publish speculative fiction didn’t mean we wanted to be inundated with dragons. ONE dragon, that was IT. And like “Ink Stains”, where the male writer doesn’t take up the protagonist mantle, in “The Dragon Peddler,” the dragon doesn’t take centre stage, either. It’s the motivating factor and a reward, but its loss or gain isn’t the defining characteristic for the protagonist. It’s a bonus.

Food pairing: Mac’n’cheese with cut-up hot dogs.

“Tomorrow’s Friend” by Dantzel Cherry: It’s a simple little tale, and it’s cute, and it’s nice. It’s reassuring without being patronizing and even when the protagonist is shown that what she wants is attainable, she still has to put the work in to get it. That’s low stakes and reasonable expectations, right there.

Food pairing: Fairground waffle ice cream sandwiches.

“Hollow” by Melissa DeHaan: Full disclosure, Melissa’s my sister and I asked her to write a story for A Quiet Afternoon. Though she’s never tried writing short stories professionally, she’s been writing fanfic for ages as well as running a few webcomics (her current one being Harbourmaster and I am absolutely plugging it because it is entirely Low-Fi), so I knew she’d come up with something. That something is our third magical robots story. Our protagonists don’t like each other. They never end up really liking each other. But they can work as a team to get a job done and after that they need never see each other again. And for those of us raised as girls, where we’re taught we must befriend everyone and heaven help you if you aren’t instant besties and caretakers and therapists for all you meet, it’s real refreshing reading a story that says NOPE to that idea.

Food pairing: Boba—matcha milk tea, 20% sugar, regular ice, with tapioca. A little bitter, earthy, filling, and unashamed. LOOK THOU WHAT BOBA MAY BE.

“Of Buckwheat and Garlic Braids” by Adriana C. Grigore: This is exactly what we wanted Low-Fi to be. A protagonist from an underrepresented group (trans men), whose transness is shown succinctly and sympathetically, who Uses His Words to solve a problem. And! The potentially dangerous monster ALSO uses her words! LET’S EVERYONE USE OUR WORDS!

Food pairing: The cheesy garlic bread absolutely drenched with butter from the Italian joint near my old highschool. Utterly satisfying.

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You can find out more about or buy the A Quiet Afternoon anthology from Grace&Victory publications or Payhip.

Speculative Fiction in Slovenia

Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Literature in Slovenia
Guest post by Nena Škerlj; translated by Urša Vidic

Speculative fiction in Slovenia started with fantastic short stories, utopias and anti-utopias: Andrej Volkar (The School Student in the Moon, 1871), Josip Stritar (The Ninth Wonderland, 1878), Anton Mahnič (Shangri-La of Coromandel India, 1884, 1889), Janez Trdina (Revelation, depicting the world in the year 2175, 1888), Ivan Tavčar (4000, a view on the narrow-minded town of Ljubljana in the year 4000, 1891), Janez Mencinger (under the pseudonym Nejaz Nemcigren, he wrote about Europe in the 24th century as a totalitarian anti-utopia, —a Tale for Old People, 1893), Simon Šubic (criticizing capitalism at a journey into a classless society on Mars, Devastating Idol of the World, 1893), Josip Jaklič (Merkur from the collection of short stories Pantheon is a satirical utopia with a Slovenian conquering space expedition, 1893), Ivan Toporiš (Archaeological lecture in the year 5000—there are no more nations on Earth, everyone speaks the same language, volapük, 1892). Utopias and anti-utopias appear quite late in Slovenian literature, but when some of these became infused with elements of science fiction, they were exceptionally progressive and modern on a wider scale, something that cannot be said for the current scene in Slovenia.

In the first half of the 20th century, Damir Feigl was the most important Slovenian science fiction writer, describing utopias of natural and technical science, voyages extraordinaires, unusual inventions, antigravity, futurism in genetics, brain transplantation (novels Dog Hair!, On Mysterious Ground, Wondrous Eye, Columbus, Magician without a licence, Around the World/8, Supervitalin). He wrote also short sci-fi stories (Bacilus eloquentiae, Elektrokephale …) and fantasy (e.g. Pharaoh in a Tailcoat). A pessimistic view on the development of science and also future catastrophes were described by Etbin Kristan (Pertinčarjevo pomlajenje—a tale of a dream), Vladimir Levstik (under pseudonyms also (The Deed)) and Anton Novačan (Superhuman). Space travels were the subject of Radivoj Rehar (under pseudonyms as well; young adult fiction Journey with the Evening Star, a story happening in 2033, Oceanopolis—a novel about the mystery of human past, the utopian Revenge of Professor Kabaj, and Ramas in Jora—a novel about the last people on Earth, taking place in the distant future). Pavel Brežnik used the pseudonym P. Ripson to publish Secrets of Mars, while Metod Jenko and Viktor Hassl co-authored the narrative Invention. In 1936, Alma M. Karlin published a novel about the sunken continent Isolanthis, describing a sort of Atlantis, called Poseidonia and containing many fantastical, fantasy, as well as theosophical elements.

In the 2nd half of the 20th century, it became very popular to write about space travel and contacts with alien civilizations and the most prominent examples of such writing are Dušan Kralj (First Encounter), Jože Dolničar (Pilot’s Blood, Decades and Seconds, The Sea is the Sky beneath Me) and Mitja Tavčar (Cabin Zero space opera). Vid Pečjak and Miha Remec write science fiction anti-utopias, but occasionally they both choose an optimistic ending in which individuals are successful in escaping the alienated hi-tech world. Vid Pečjak (also as Div Kajčep) described journey to other worlds, the life in them, various psychological states of mind and he warned about the fragility of nature (In the Claws of Gita, the Witch, Adam and Eve on the Planet of Old People, In the Embrace of Green Hell, Cataclysm or the Revenge of Selena, collections of short psychological science fiction stories like Where did Ema Lauš Disappear to?, Doctor of the Living and the Dead, Last Resistance and Search for the Beautiful Helena). His ecological-psychological science fiction is often pessimistic and the same could be said about the works of Miha Remec (also as Irena Remrom), the most prominent among them being the dystopian trilogy Iksion-Iksia-Iks (Iksion, or Escape from the Stage, Iksia, or Android's Farewell and Iks, or The Great Solitude of Noah’s Ark). He wrote many multi-layered and interpretatively rich sci-fi stories (Glow Bird, Astral Lighthouses, a selection) and science fiction novels (Journals of Earth's Envoy, Manna, Sniper Woman, or Pilgrimage to Tibetia, Hunter, Recognition or Black Time of the White Widow, Impure Daughter). He described also journeys in time (Mithra’s Lock of Hair or Time String into Petoviona) and frequently called attention to the endangerment of human beings as individuals and of nature as a whole. In 2017, Miha Remec published another science fiction novel, Hunter of Perceptions. He writes also sci-fi poetry, drama and fairytales, a unique fantasy tragicomedy Plague of Plastion and a political fantasy novel Green Alliance, as well as humorous fantasy-realistic historical and political stories Trapan Chronographies where things happen simultaneously on Earth and on Trapania. Franjo (Franc) Puncer published a sci-fi collection entitled Lost Man, pessimistic accounts of the time before or after a catastrophe. In his short story Transformation, people are being changed into robots and the novel Membrane, he writes about how people from Earth are abducted immediately after their death in order to be reanimated and used as a means to renew the population of aliens. Other authors writing at the peak of Slovenian and global sci-fi—in terms of motifs as well as their style—are Gregor Strniša, Boris Grabnar and Branko Gradišnik (his Explorer arbitrarily kills intelligent and harmless round beings; also remarkable is his visit to the 22nd century, On the Hunt, on the Run).

In the 80s, sci-fi was written by Samo Kuščer, Denis Rakuša, Bojan Meserko, Egist Zagoričnik, Jaša Zlobec and many more. In their stories (Miha Remec), alien beings could save the Earth or do not want to have anything to do with Earthlings or it is forbidden for them to contact us (Gradišnik, Pečjak), or they are taken advantage of (Pečjak) or they all live together with humans on other planets (Janja Srečkar, Fast Frequency trilogy)… Mankind is able to prevent a disaster on Earth (Sandi Sitar, Buried in Granite) or it destroys the planet (Samo Resnik, Stars and dumpsites, Vid Pečjak: Odysseus Returns), but a complete end of the human race is quite rare in Slovenian sci-fi literature (Franjo Puncer: Adamo).

Elements of cyberpunk or its predecessor genres can be recognized in Pečjak’s story Open Skulls, where an alien civilization steals human brains and uses them to produce supercomputers and only the brains of schizophrenics can save mankind from such an invasion. Also Iksion, or Escape from the Stage by Remec has such elements—a computer, programmed for eternity, making sure that human society functions well. The same can be said of his Recognition where people’s memories are being erased or searched. A work that stands out is the philosophical and futuristic novel Cracks by Marko Uršič, a fantasy of space and time intertwining in make-believe, memories, dreams and waking moments. Edo Rodošek is the third great figure of the Slovenian sci-fi scene. In addition to poetry he wrote many stories (most recently the collection from 2017, Step into the Unknown—Eighteen Stories That Have Not Happened Yet) and novels (Inseparable Duo takes place in the future when asteroids threaten the Earth and its main character searches for other planets suitable for life, while the main character of The Swamp is a conflicted cyborg, and in Almost the Same, robots, androids, cyborgs and other technological entities wish to dream, to feel, to have perceptions and emotions. His novel Haunted Castle features ghosts for which it eventually turns out that they are beings from other planets). In the weirdness of its themes and by being something like a mysterious gothic novel, it is somehow similar to the Manor House by Robert Titan Felix from 2017.

Around the turn of the millennium, some outstanding Slovenian sci-fi authors are Berta Bojetu (her brutal anti-utopia Filio is Not at Home and its sequel, Bird House, both describing how it is not the fault of technology but of people themselves if their society is violent and evil), Marjetka Jeršek (Emerald City, a utopian love novel, a mixture of dreams, hallucinations and eventual parallel worlds with robots and interplanetary vehicles, Ljubljana can be recognized here), Miha Mazzini (futuristic anti-utopia Satan’s Crown), Tone Perčič (Harmageddon on the future of Slovenia in an absurd war), Andrej Blatnik (Change Me, describing a grotesque future and extreme consumerism, again, Ljubljana is recognizable), Vesna Lemaić (Disposal Facility), Iztok Osojnik (the protagonist of the fantasy novel Pigs Flying into the Sky is Primož Truba, an allusion to Trubar, author of the first book printed in Slovenian), Boris Čerin (futuristic Curse of the Two-Headed Clown and They Came for Me), Mladen Tratnjak (sci-fi novel Observatory 775), Nina Arlič (Gorgonaut, a sort of a sci-fi love story with the protagonist Paprika Kej of a librarian persuasion), Janko Lorenci (sci-fi love story Travelling towards Leonarda), Rok Sieberer Kuri (futuristic trilogy taking place also in other galaxies and universes: Stories of Jessi, The Story of Frenk Nissan, Sherry’s Storry), Franc Puncer (Rope of Time containing travels to a far future and extreme future, to the frontier—a web, through which time flows into our universe and that catches the rest; from the prehistoric town of Celje (Celea Praehistorica) to New Celje (Celea Futura), and the city of the year 4000 (Celea Futurissma)). The author under the pseudonym Mara R. Sirako wrote a space saga (space opera) Dangober, Combat by the Warning Indicator 1, 2, 3, describing an encounter and clash of two very different civilizations where many beings have names and characteristics that are associated with deities from various mythologies.

Andrej Ivanuša wrote novels and short stories of speculative fiction, but also the fantasy novel Svetodrev which is the first book in the series of Legends from the Forest of Tokara (fantasy world with intelligent reptiles who have three sexes), as well as the science fiction with elements of a crime novel, Rheia, and an epic fantasy poem Vilindar. Bojan Ekselenski is the author of a fantasy epic full of intrigues, magic and battles, Knights and Wizards, published in 2017. His latest novel from 2018 is Lubliana High School of Magic with its world of wizards that is parallel to the real world. Barbara Čibej wrote a fantasy adventure novel with ninjas, the Secret of the Warrior. Under the pseudonym of Maia Pleiades, an adventure fantasy was published, The Final Battle of the Gods. Sebastjan Koleša portrayed pirates, elves, goblins, demons, terrifying beasts, beings from outer space and other extraordinary creatures in The Seventh World.

Slovenian chivalric, horror, gothic and dark novels usually take place in medieval times and are combined with the mixture of adventure, myths, pseudo-history, fairy-tales, legends and the fantasy world. They describe knights, witches, heroes and heroines, nobility, castles and monasteries. An interweaving of history and fiction can be found already in the 14th century with the Celje Chronicles and it continued in the 19th and 20th centuries with Peter Bohinjec, Jožef Urbanija, Ivan Lah and many more. In 1858, Fran Levstik wrote a parody of the chivalric novel, Martin Krpan. There was also some horror literature and fantastic novels about demons (Valentin Zarnik, Fran Erjavec, Valentin Mandelc, Josip Podmilšak, Silvester Košutnik, France Bevk (The Dead are Returning). Some people say that the first in the series of vampire sagas (like those by Isabella M. Grey, Eva Šegatin…) was a passage in the monumental work by the natural historian Johann Weikhard Freiherr von Valvasor, The Glory of the Duchy of Carniola, in 1689, where he mentioned Giure or Jure Grando (1579–1656) from Istria (Kringa) who therefore might be the first real person to be described in a book as a vampire—a shtrigon.

Alen Nemec wrote the book Swordsman (2017) that will be the first part of a fantasy trilogy, The Resurrection of the Swordsman containing stories about warriors, castles, kingdoms, intrigues, myths, dark forces and the battles against them. Aleš Oblak is the author of a horror fantasy House of Good Gentlemen, composed of seven intertwined, unusual, terrifying and cruel short stories. For Anor Kath by Samo Petančič it could be said that it is splatterpunk to a certain degree, since it has some moments of horror and terror fiction. Similar elements of fantasy and science fiction in a dark and gloomy atmosphere of cruelty and violence can be recognized also in the work of Lenart Zajc (e.g. Hevimetal). Another important author of fantasy stories is Amedeja M. Ličen (Goodbye, Glorious World! where she uses motifs from science, pseudoscience and myths to describe an ideal society with lots of humour and irony, since that society is of course not ideal). Danila Žorž has to be mentioned as well, she wrote an archaeological sci-fi crime novel Izklop, a fantasy trilogy True World: Enchanting Angel, Cursed Angel and Fallen Angel that is still in the making).

A hybridity of genres is characteristic of more modern science fiction, fantasy and horror, like in the works of Marjan Tomšič, where there is a mixture of magical and fantastic realism, science fiction and psych fiction, imaginary and philosophical elements, magical Istrian themes, superpowers, evil dark forces, thinking plants, animals and inanimate nature, new forms of communication in outer space, the threat of disasters and the contacts with aliens. His Spells of the Full Moon (3 volumes) are a psycho-fictional vortex of post-apocalyptic horror fantasy, dreams, hallucinations and unusual entities of existence, while, Óštrigéca and The Grain of Frmenton are contemporary fairytale novels, just like Someone was Playing the Piano by Boris Jukić and Tanaja by Sanja Pregl. Vlado Žabot in his Nights of the Wolf described a weird, dark and dispiriting vampiric atmosphere, an irrational world of dreams, half-dreams, delusions, sensory disturbances and hallucinations. Tomšič, Žabot and Feri Lainšček (in his horror novel The Woman Carried in by the Fog) could sometimes be considered to write landscape fantasy horror novels. The Secret of the Valley of Petrified Dragons trilogy by Nataša Vrbančič Kopač (Generator of Books, Dragon Temple, Battle for Erno) contains elements of comedy, ethics and physics and begins with a scientist whose invention gets out of control and this is then followed by a long and fantastic journey. Axis mundi, Axis of the World (written by Aksinja Kermauner) is a combination of fantasy, contemporary physics, chaos theory, journey into the past and much more. Boris Višnovec wrote a collection of sci-fi stories Hunters of Dreams.

Tim Horvat described a search of Atlantis in his Seekers of Lost Cities—Treasure of Triglav, where there is a hall inside the highest mountain of Slovenia and in it the Porta Thrigllaev—the only portal into Atlantis. In Frankensteins of the New Era, Gaja Hren wrote an antiutopia with many clones (Albert Einstein, Adolf Hitler, Friedrich Nietzsche, Nikola Tesla, Leonardo da Vinci…). Dušan Dim described a futuristic world where people have an advanced technology implanted under their skin, Excuse me, your life does not exist.

The tradition of utopias has its place also in young adult fiction and in children's—but not childish—literature, represented by Ivo Šorli (In the Land of Chirimoorzzi—an underground tale for the young), Branimir Žganjer (Exactly Three Days Late), Miha Remec (Dandelion Fluff in Space), Ivan Sivec (Holydays on Mars) and Vid Pečjak (various novels and short stories featuring robots). Writers of young adult fantasy are Magdalena Cundrič: Alioth or the Tail of the Grat Bear (dreams, holograms, robots, hybrids), Barbara Čibej (Arcas and The Warrior’s Secret), Maks Lenart Černelč’s W5051 Family, Žiga X. Gombač: Buddies and Time Warriors (about ancient bracelets, interdimensional portals, being between times).

Some of the more interesting comic book authors are Branko Zinauer (sci-fi comic Planet of Three Suns), Andrej Hermann (sci-fi psychological thriller Airport without Guards), Bojan Šlegl (sci-fi comics Circ-I Calling Earth, Earth Fleat Attacking together with the writer Marko Mihelčič), Božo Debeljak (Shipwreck in Space), Gašper Krajnc (“monster horror” comic Rite in cooperation with the writer Matic Večko), Tomaž Lavrič (hardcore sci-fi comic Blind Sun, fantasy trilogy Lomm about an unusual being from the nest of flying mutants) and the funny sci-fi comics Erlšpik on the Planet Beta and Radovan from the Planet Beta (Matjaž Schmidt). Under the name of Ninel, Iztok Sitar’s comic reinterpreted the antiutopia 4000 by Tavčar, where Ljubljana of the future has flying saucers, but it is still rather a town of the past. should also be mentioned Jakob Klemenčič, his comics feature some morbid characters, weirdoes, six-legged pigs, chickens with three eyes and calves with two heads (Tale of the Painting Man), Marko Kociper (aliens in the comic Badger and the Rest of the World) and Matej Kocjan—Koco, whose Honey talks—Painted Beehive Panels in Comics have a great deal of fantasy and sci-fi and are continuously being published since 2006.

The most important Slovenian publisher of speculative fiction is the Blodnjak publishing studio with authors like Igor Zobavnik, Aaron Kronski/Tomo Rebolj, Bojan Meserko and others. Short sci-fi, fantasy and horror stories are occasionally published in anthologies (Terra—almanac of science fiction, Stardust, Stardust—Another Galaxy, Singularity, Blodnjak (Maze) of science fiction, Blodnjak 2, 4 and 6, Fantazija) and in magazines like Življenje in tehnika, Neskončnost, Supernova—Magazine for speculative fiction and Jašubeg en Jered (that sometimes has a special issue in English, Jashubeg en Jered). ŽIT magazine (Življenje in tehnika or Ljudska tehnika originally) started to publish the first sci-fi stories in 1952. At first, these were mostly translations, but after 1989 more stories written by Slovenian authors emerged, amounting to about 10 percent of all the stories in the magazine; from 2015, their share is now about 90 percent. The publishing house that owns the magazine—Tehniška založba Slovenije, has been making sci-fi collections from 1961 to 1996, they were called Spektrum (In Rainbow Wings, I’m Afraid, How the World was saved…) and they contained many first published works by Slovenian writers such as Marjan Tomšič and his Wind of Eternity.

In 2017, the young adult fantasy novel Taronian Secret by Maja M. Taron came out, as well as the young adult fantasy Argo Megacircus by Feri Lainšček. Milan Petek Levokov wrote So Close, So Far Away—short sci-fi prose—these are classic science fiction stories with elements of humour, pessimism, philosophy and a lot more. In the same year, he published four other books and had another one reprinted. In 2018, Erik Sancin wrote the science-fiction novel Elevator in which he painted a new image of an impoverished Earth and Moon after the Third Cataclysm. The planet is inhabited by so-called Othersiders, who are New Territory people, and by mutated and degenerated beings (cannibals or so-called Overalls). This dynamic novel sometimes switches from being like a first-person shooter game to being like a stealth game and back and I could easily imagine it in the form of a video game or a film. I really hope that it will be at least translated into English.

Motifs of fantasy and horror have for a long time been present in Slovenian literature, especially in science fiction. Scientific, technical and social utopias and anti-utopias appeared relatively late, but when they did, they soon became very popular. Thought experiments with theoretically possible worlds are still quite common. On the other hand, science fiction, was establishes rather soon (second half of the 19thcentury) and contained some very modern ideas. Then it continued to be created in quiet for a while until it reached its new peak in the eighties.

Tomaž Janežič in his Resurrection of Neptune used elements of cyberpunk to describe the genius computer programme called Neptune. It was followed by the 2nd generation Neptune with which its extra-systemic visionary hacker creator was brought back to life with some telekinetic and other improvements. The story takes place in Ljubljana (there is BTB—a Bermuda triangle of Bežigrad) and is based on the premise that water is eternal, so since a human body is made up of 70% water (this is why the name of the programme is Neptune), this share of a human being is eternal and only 30% belong to the sphere of time, which could be changed so that time would not be the strongest part of us anymore. Muanis Sinanović’s Anastrophe (2017) is a mixture of cyberpunk and New Weird (Ljubljana is featured among other places; it loses its status of a town in the future and becomes a village).

Martin Vavpotič, a representative of steampunk or retrofuturism wrote the historical fantasy novel Over Great West Sea and in the English language, he published Clockworks Warrior: a steampunk novella containing flying machines and other fantastical ideas. Individual elements of both these genres are present also in some stories by Pečjak, Remec and others. Wonderful Clone by Barbara Pešut under the pseudonym of Eva Pacher is a piece of mutant erotic/pornographic science fiction. Marko Vitas wrote 2084, a sci-fi dystopia (another one taking place in Ljubljana) which is the unofficial continuation of the cult classic 1984 by George Orwell. Fantasy, fiction, futurism, philosophy and cosmology are combined in the philosophical and literary tetralogy—Four Seasons by Marko Uršič, where things happen in the past and in the future, in multi-layered versions of the present and in timelessness, while exploring strict, hard-core philosophy, its history and its present. The works by Matjaž Štrancar like Blue Drug and Other Stories contain sci-fi and alternative histories.

Grasshopper Hunter by Jurij Pfeifer is philosophical, humorous and grotesque sci-fi novel. Frane Tomšič’s Third Century in the Era of Cybernetics is a futuristic and philosophical post-apocalyptic anti-utopia set in the far future. In 2017 and 2018, Sebastijan Pešec published his philosophical fantasy novel Perdikas. Wondrous discoveries, voyages extraordinaires, dark tales of the strange can often be found as parts or as defining characteristics of literary works and increasing number of hybrid literature that is full of sci-fi, fantasy and horror elements. 2018 saw also the publication of the English translation of The Barrens by Miha Remec and his sci-fi anti-utopia Poetovian Trilogy (Clone Sin, Spider Webs of Time, Poetovian Desinification the latter two were written together with Aleksandra Jelušič). Among interesting releases this year are also the sci-fi crime novel Wotan’s Daughters by Tomaž Kukovica, Another Colour of Rain by Nejka Štiglic from her Different Colours series, the dystopia by Alojz Rebula where the Vatican is relocated to China, By the Tributary of the Yangtze. The slipstream that is rich with fiction is probably more interesting for the (post)information age than the old-school sci-fi, so for quite some time now there are sudden elements of fantasy, postmodern fiction, magic realism, futuristic, supernatural and surrealistic worlds in a realistic narrative flow (Mammoths by Jernej Županič, Dušan Merc, Lev Detela, Mojca Kumerdej, Milan Kleč, Eva Markun).

Unlike in traditional Slovenian novels, genres were mixed more intensely towards the end of the 20th century and novels from that time and later have many unusual or bizarre characteristics resembling fairytales, anti-utopias, alternative histories, the fantastic or horror. This hybridity of genres still continues at the present moment, so it is very fortunate that contemporary Slovenian novels have a stronger and stronger trend to include various fantastic, futuristic and fantasy elements.

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Nena Škerlj is a philosopher and art historian and works as a librarian in some super libraries, does many different things, engages in various and diverse activities, but above all likes to stick her nose into books as can well be seen in this photo that is actually an installation, a One Minute Sculpture by Erwin Wurm.